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"No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the
people without desiring something like a revolution for the better."
Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 393.

FOREWORD

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order
and try another.

The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian or
Anglo Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as a
referendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting.
The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted
another with different interests and different views. That is what a
general election enables the people to do in England every seven years
if they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in
England; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For
example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic
concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a
revolutionist.

All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The
most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older,
though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to
their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform.

Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the
existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.

AND YET

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only
shifted it to another shoulder.

JOHN TANNER

I

ON GOOD BREEDING

If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be
necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex
machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god
of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is
indeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he
used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself
into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and
such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is
real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and
priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from
commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom,
from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from
polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to
pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general
literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from
metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to
Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the changes
from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house
dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer's draught horse and the
race horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature
to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And
what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monsters
as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by products of Man's
individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product
of his universal aspiration?

This is no new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and the
inexorable "ye must be born again," with Mrs Poyser's stipulation, "and
born different," recurs in every generation. The cry for the Superman
did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it
has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is
this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super apple, but for an eatable
apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or
velocity... Continue reading book >>